Charles Godfrey

Charles Morris Godfrey (September 24, 1917 – July 24, 2022) was an American-born Canadian physician, professor and politician in Durham Region. He served as an Ontario New Democratic Party Member of Provincial Parliament for two years in the Ontario legislature, but he is best known for having led the protests against the proposed Pickering International Airport in the 1970s, which forced the federal government to mothball the project. Background Godfrey was born on September 24, 1917, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but his family moved to Toronto when he was seven months old. His father was a physiotherapist who encouraged Godfrey to study medicine. He served in the Canadian military for five and a half years during World War II and qualified as a physiotherapist while serving. After the war, he enrolled at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, paying for his schooling by working as a janitor and scrapyard worker before graduating in 1953. In 1956, he studied neurology at Oxford University on a McLaughlin Fellowship and became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1958. He also earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1962 and his Masters of Arts in 1975, and he was studying for his PhD in the late 1980s when he was in his 70s. Medical career After returning from England in the late 1950s, he became director of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Toronto East General Hospital. He subsequently worked at Toronto General Hospital, Sunnybrook Hospital and the Toronto Rehab before joining Wellesley Hospital's rheumatic disease unit, ultimately becoming head of the hospital's rehabilitation clinic. He was a professor in the department of rehabilitative medicine at the University of Toronto for over two decades. In 1968, Godfrey was the author of "The Cholera Epidemics in Upper Canada, 1832 – 1866". When in his 70s, he was still working 13-hour days teaching and maintaining his own practice while spending weekends at his country home in Madoc, Ontario with his wife, Margaret, and family. He resigned from membership in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario as of August 31, 2020.